Those who don’t like reading a few paragraphs me writing about me on occasion, as the start of this blog will be, skip it. I know that’s a lot of you. But I know I have a few hardcore readers still out there.

There are two sides to me: the kid who grew up partially in New York City, where a rat once jumped into my stroller and bit me (ask my mom), the kid who grew up on a surprisingly brutal playground atmosphere later in New Hampshire, who grew up poor and had to fight, literally, for a lot of things.

Then there is the kid who also partially grew up on an honest-to-goodness commune in Vermont, where I once lived for a while in a teepee and we baked our own bread in woodstoves, where we all talked about peace and love for our common man and played the Beatles and Bob Dylan on turntables and might have smoked a little pot. Oh, and for a while there were a couple of Weather Underground fugitives from the law[3] who lived there too.

I was either fighting with a kid on a basketball court in New Hampshire or painting peace signs on the back of a VW bus in Vermont.

OK, the stuff about me is over now. What does this have to do with the CBA, though? Nothing probably. No, make that absolutely. Nothing about my past matters at all in this story. But does it maybe help guys like me see things like this lockout a little differently than many? After thinking it over some lately, I think the answer is yes.

I understand this lockout and I don’t understand it, with my two histories of upbringing warring against the other for which makes more sense. OK, that sounded real pretentious.

Look, here’s how I see it:
– Only one thing is going to end this lockout, and that’s when the NHL tells Donald Fehr it doesn’t want to play his game anymore. The NHL has concluded this: the only thing Fehr respects is a drop-dead deadline. So, soon, they will give it. Probably not for another 1-2 weeks though.

“It’s a game he wants to play. It’s the game he’s told his constituents forever that he wants to play, and he has a date in mind,” said one NHL exec, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have a (bleep) date in mind too. But until (last week), we hadn’t even thought about canceling games again. Guys were so consumed with getting a deal done, that until (last week) we were like ‘Holy (bleep), we’ve only canceled through Dec. 14.'”

Now, games are canceled through Dec. 30. The sides had a session in New Jersey today involving a mediator, but it went nowhere.

At times, I’ve seen the sides as varying shades of Vermont and New Hampshire. I really think last week, the NHL was Vermont. I think they bought into some peace and love for a couple days, helped along by people like Ron Burke and Jeff Vinik, and were ready to share some baked bread with their fellow man. And I think there were some on the players’ side who were ready to break that bread, once and for all.

But I think New Hampshire (Fehr) jumped in and put a stop to all that. I think he came in and said something to the effect of “Are you guys nuts? This deal stinks. Let’s do better than this.”

Does that mean I think Fehr alone scuttled the whole deal? Probably not, no. But in that one instance, I do worry that the players had a deal on the table that was going to be OK for them and the game, and now that’s gone for them and now they’re scrambling a bit to get stuff back that they may have already lost.

The Vermont side of me definitely sympathizes with the players. “Why do the owners have to be so mean? Why do they have to be so damn ignorant of the fact that THEY CAUSED ALL THESE PROBLEMS THEY NOW BELLYACHE ABOUT. You don’t make as much money as you want, NHL owner? Then STOP GIVING JIRI HUDLER A FOUR-YEAR, $16 MILLION CONTRACT.

Don’t like long-term contracts, NHL owner? Then YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE GIVEN ZACH PARISE AND RYAN SUTER 13-YEAR CONTRACTS, YOU IDIOT.

This is not the players’ fault. Players for a long time have had to try and fix the mistakes made by Gary Bettman. Here’s a broadside from a staunch member of the player side of the aisle, someone who has both played the game (for a long time) and been a part of pro hockey management – again given to me on the condition of anonymity:

“Gary has asked the players for 20 years to solve his problems. And whatever deal they make now, it’s not going to solve his problems. Only five or six teams are running this league, along with Bettman. They’re going to do what’s best for themselves. They could care less about the middle class and they could care less about the poor. What this league really needs most is revenue sharing. If they had a real revenue-sharing system, the poor would have a chance to make money along with the middle class, and the very rich teams would have to take a little less. But Bettman will never go for it, and as long as guys like Jeremy Jacobs and Murray Edwards are running the league along with Bettman, it’s never going to happen.”

And yet, and yet…from several accounts of those who were in the bargaining room last week in New York during those roller-coaster meetings from Tuesday-Thursday: it was Jacobs who got a sudden infusion of Vermont commune in him.
It was Jacobs, two eyewitnesses told me, who strongly pushed for the increase in the “make whole” number from $211 million to $300 million.

“And he took some grief for that, from the smaller market teams who didn’t want any part of that,” one from the NHL aisle said. “But he was like, ‘I don’t care, let’s do it. If it makes a deal, let’s do it and get it over with. It’s best for the game right now, so let’s do it.”

But when Fehr came to the mic in his hastily arranged manner – before the NHL had actually had a chance to respond to the NHLPA’s latest offer, which remains a major sore point with the owners right now – he said one of the bigger issues holding up a deal was…player pensions.

Player pensions? Really? That was never publicly mentioned as a top priority for Fehr in the months leading up to last Thursday. (A person from the NHLPA has since told me that, yes, it’s always been a big issue for them – it just wasn’t out in the open much).

(By the way, about the worst place you can have your money, if you’re a 25-year-old hockey player making good money, is in a pension fund. Much better to put it in real mutual or hedge funds instead of a slow-growing pension fund, but I digress).

We’ve been in mutual blather since.

This remains the deal: Only until Fehr thinks he can’t hold out for any more will he MAYBE cut a deal with the league.

Most around the game still believe a season will be salvaged. But here’s what keeps some on the NHL side up at night, and I wonder if it keeps some players up too. Let’s call it the Scenario That Keeps People Up at Night:
Basically, it goes like this: Donald Fehr maybe doesn’t want a deal, maybe has no intention of doing a deal for this year.”

“We think he probably has a clause where he can’t be fired by the PA, or if he does, he gets a gigantic balloon payment. So, what’s the downside for him for a season being cancelled?” said the same league exec, quoted earlier. “Either way, he still gets his money. He still gets to keep his reputation as the baddest ass in labor negotiations and the sport dies that he could not give two (bleeps) about.”

Being a certified conspiracy theorist, I can maybe buy in to that. Right, then Fehr, after either being fired or after the league totally self-destructs in a fireball, might plausibly be able to say something like “You know what, I tried to save these guys. I tried inject some of the smart ideas that made baseball such a big success under my watch, but in the end I just couldn’t save ‘em.”

That would be pretty Machiavellian of Fehr, but the man is nothing if not a student of history, and if you buy into the conspiracy theory that his eye is on the long view of history in this whole thing, then well maybe you can just kiss this season goodbye already.

I really don’t think I buy into that theory yet. But it’s there. The New Hampshire side of me says “It can happen.”

I asked an influential NHL exec, another one than the one listed above, if this is all still way too close to blow up a season for? I said, “Come on, we’ll have a season, right?” His response:

“We’ll play if (Fehr) wants us to play. We aren’t going to surrender on what really need to make him a hero.”

And the response from the other side, from the same guy before:
“The NHL is run by a bunch of lawyers. It’s not run by business-minded people. I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen, or at least I think the chances of the way I see it happening are 90 percent: The players gave everything they had to give, to make a deal last week, OK? And the NHL walked away. They’re going to announce next week they’re canceling the season, knowing they’ve still got about 30 days to fix it, to salvage it. They’re going to put the pressure back on the players. And they’re not going to call, they’re not going to talk, they’re not going to have anything going on for about a week-to-10 days. Then they’ll go back to the table. And they’re going to hope the players by that time have (bleeped) themselves, and hope that they’re going to fold, with another home run win by Bettman and his crooks. Having said that, if the players hold tight and say “Go (bleep) yourself”, and Bettman takes a hike, then there’s a chance he could get canned, because the majority of the teams in the league want to play.”

Some high stakes chicken there, those scenarios.

So I have a final suggestion in all this: why don’t we all meet back at my dad’s place in Vermont. We can hash this out, pun intended. NHL, you bring the Dylan, NHLPA, you bring the Beatles, I’ll bake some bread, we’ll come to peace and then we’ll finally drop the damn puck. And if any New Hampshire wants to crash the proceeding and spoil things: can’t wait to see them try to skate on after things were properly hashed out with them.